


The Power of Love

by hearden



Category: Heroes RPG
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Nami's Future, F/F, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-23 21:27:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2556302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearden/pseuds/hearden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dom thought that getting thrown into the future meant her present - now her past - would never come back. Her family of that time, her friends of that time were all lost to her memories; she was stuck in this future where things looked more grim than she could've ever imagined with nobody familiar as a friend, only a bunch of strangers' faces. But, Dom was wrong; she can never be truly alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Power of Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thanhbear](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thanhbear/gifts).



> For my lovely friends over @ Heroes RPG (http://heroesrpg.tumblr.com). 
> 
> Thank you, once again, to Thanh and Alyssa for giving me permission to write with their characters. Tbh, this probably sucks a lot, but you know.
> 
> This is really blocky. I'm sorry. I'm trying to work on not writing blocks.

**January 5th, 2036** \- New York City, New York.

Dom’s only been in the future a total of two months or so, but sixty-plus days isn’t enough to get her used to the constant buzzing in her head. Twenty years has changed everything, inside and out. Technology is all hands-free, coming in packages of holographic watches, glasses with electronic displays (similar to the ones Andrew developed back home - she wonders if they were his prototype, and this is his product). There’s a higher number, she notices, of people touching the air, but it looks normal rather than strange. Some are post-humans pretending to use holograms instead of their powers (powers like James, she thinks, to see wavelengths of activity that humans had to work twenty years to perfect), and some are just people with their various devices. Nobody carries a phone anymore, and while dusty payphones sat on street corners back in 2015, there isn’t even a trace of one here. There’s so much activity - digital activity - and her power has been going haywire for weeks.

She managed to seek refuge with some of Nami’s friends - apparently, she’s somewhat of a modern myth or legend in the underground - and spends her days and nights doing odd little things. Dom’s been getting herself used to the new technology around her, pulling up history files and news articles on datapads. Libraries are gone; books are gone; it seems sad, actually, to see building after building but a completely lack of some library or bookstore. It almost makes her expect to see food served in capsules or tablets or something like those other futuristic sci-fi movies she’s seen, but that isn’t the case. There’s still fast food and cars, stuff like that. The only thing she doesn’t see is open post-humans; it’s one of those hush-hush topics. Taboo. Nexus is everywhere, watching for people who even approach it, and at the same time, they’re nowhere. She doesn’t see them, but one of Nami’s friends warns her that the amount she should be careful is absurdly very. It gives her a sense of paranoia, and that’s what makes her blend in so easily. Everyone’s got a little bit of paranoia in 2036.

Her paranoia runs its course and stops right at a brick wall after her first New Year’s in the future, though. Dom walks out of an electronics store, fresh from pretending to download this week’s news updates from the store’s data port, while in reality, her ability was hard at work. The strain gave her a headache already, but when she turns the corner and passes in front of an alleyway, the person who practically bowls into her puts her in more pain. Dom stumbles and almost falls over but doesn’t quite; the person’s weight added to the force they were exerting didn’t quite match how anchored to the ground she was, despite being caught off-guard. “Hey-” She’s about to tell the person off - maybe they’re just a nighttime drunk or something - when they apologize. “I’m sorry, I really am! It’s my fault, I-” She knows that voice. _Knows_ it, dreams about it because she fell head over heels for the speaker, wishes she could hear it again, if only for awhile. It’s the voice of the person who’s missing from this whole future - the future where they’re part of an underground resistance… except they’ve been stuck in the past for some time.

"Nami…" Dom doesn’t quite register, doesn’t even ask if it’s really her - maybe she made a mistake. The name just tumbles from her lips as she catches the stranger who has trouble even keeping their head up. That invokes a reaction, though, and the person who bumped into her looks up. Recognition passes between them, but it comes easier in Nami’s eyes than it does in Dom’s. The girl in front of her is bruised and battered, clothes wrinkled messily and face covered in dirt. There’s a stain on her shirt, partially hidden by her jacket, that looks suspiciously like blood, but Dom doesn’t see any other trails so either it’s not Nami’s shirt or it’s an old wound. Her friend looks ten times different, though, and Dom might have not recognized her had she not been thinking about her constantly, at least once a week. Time had taken some sort of toll on Nami, kicking her body into a terrible state. Dom can feel it through their physical contact - the body she’s holding up, helping support, is shaking to the core with little tremors. And Nami’s face - once of a twenty-three-year-old is starting to develop wrinkles around the edges. She’s not sure if it’s just dirt or an illusion of lighting, but she thinks that might be a grey streak of hair in the black waves but it looks completely natural instead of dyed.

She sees absolute relief in Nami’s eyes - like a sensation of letting some huge burden go. “I found you,” Nami breathes, suddenly gripping one of Dom’s arms tightly as her legs appear to give out, “Crap-” Dom holds her tighter than before, making sure that Nami doesn’t fall, doesn’t slip, doesn’t collapse to her knees. “Wh- what happened to you?” She’s afraid to ask because she thinks she knows the answer, but… the temptation and her concern is too great. Nami shifts and pulls herself into a more stable position, using Dom’s waist as a crutch - but it’s fine, she’ll be her crutch. Whatever she needs. Personal space isn’t her problem right now; the fact that Nami looks like she went through a blender - well, that is. “I went looking for you, silly.” comes the reply, and it stabs at her chest that Nami is trying to laugh it off with a tidbit of humor. This is dead serious, but something seems to have come loose within her friend. “You…” The idea takes time for her to process, and she can’t just look through the parts like a machine. It’s absurd - Nami looked for her? How? For how long? Where? Dom can’t even fathom the idea because it just sounds so far-fetched. Where would have Nami even started? “How did you know to come here?” Dom asks, mentally cringing the moment she finished because it’s a stupid question. Nami probably didn’t know. Whether to humor her or actually provide an answer, Nami smiles, but it’s a half-smile, almost forced, a void of its usual cheery emotion, “Luck was on my side.” The dark-haired girl fishes inside her shirt with one hand and pulls out a string necklace with an assortment of little charms at the end, except they’re not charms. There’s a circular piece of jade, a tiny bluebird charm, and then finally, a small metal yen piece. Nami holds up the coin, proudly displaying it, “Brings me luck.” Dom is, in a word, speculative. Skeptical. A disbeliever. Bullshit. “At first, I went all over the world looking for you. Then, when I couldn’t find you,” Nami continues, “I started going to different timelines.”

Dom’s not amazingly good at thinking about math, logic, and the physics of quantum mechanics all in one scenario, but she tries to calculate how much effort that would take and in a word sums it up to be: “ _Impossible_.” It is, after all, because everywhere means every square feet, every city, every desert, every small town on the Earth. And different timelines makes it harder because there are so many points where she could have landed. Nami didn’t know if Dom ended up in 2035 or 1935 or maybe even 476 AD or 10,000 BCE. How did she? The fact is that she didn’t. “I know,” Nami replies, and there’s a corner of her mouth that twitches into a grin - kind of like she’s proud of what she’s done (or gone mad), “Luck was on my side, otherwise I might have just kept going.” Dom’s been reading up on quantum mechanics and time-traveling and all that. And the thing is that it’s all absolutely infinite. There’s no end to all of the universes out there, and while she’s never been to a different one other than the one she was born in, she knows that more keep being created with every little alteration. “How many?” she dares to inquire because she just _has_ to know what Nami has done for her. She doesn’t want to hear the number, but at the same time, she kind of does. “Five.” Dom immediately catches that she’s lying; she’s spent her whole life observing people, so it’s so easy to see when they’re lying. However, Nami doesn’t even try to cover the fact up, doesn’t try to pull any of the tricks that Dom’s seen before. She might know that Dom knows she’s lying, but she might not care. “I want the real number, Nami.” This time, her friend almost looks ashamed and ducks her gaze to the ground before responding, very honestly. Dom suddenly hates it - the cold, hard truth.

"127."

The only sound that reaches her is the shattering of her heart, glass on a wooden floor. She doesn’t know what that number means, but it’s a big number and she can only imagine what traveling to 127 worlds would be like. It’s a far stretch, but maybe that coin does bring luck (Dom doubts it, but otherwise, Nami would have just gone on and this would have become 128). Checking everywhere on the planet in every world… So much work, so much of a toll on Nami. “I- How long have I been gone?” Nami shrugs, tightening her grip on Dom’s sweater, “Two months or so.” But, it couldn’t have been two months. Nami looks more than two months older - Hell, she looks almost ten years older. She could be twenty-three still, but Dom swears that if she saw Nami on the street, she would have taken her for a woman in her early thirties. The face she sees in front of her isn’t anywhere close to the face she’s seen in her dreams - the eyes and cheekbones, they all match up. But, the rest of it is just wrong. Forehead wrinkles that weren’t there before, a natural, grey streak that Dom remembers being dyed blue and a few other colors, a general sense of maturity that she wouldn’t have ever associated with Nami. Sure, her friend could be serious, but this is a different kind of maturity - the depressed kind where a man is stuck at the same, old, boring cubicle job for two decades and comes home every night and falls into bed, shoes still on and misery in his heart. That is what she notices when she looks at Nami - tear-jerking, heart-wrenching misery.

It’s tough to watch someone you love fall apart in front of you and just stand by, helpless. But, it’s just pure torture for Dom because she never got to see this happen; she never got to watch Nami deteriorate (and if she had the chance to, she’d probably be busy trying to save her friend from this fate). Instead, all she receives is this meeting after a long break (it’s only been months but for both of them, it’s literally been decades since they’ve seen each other in the unstable terms of time). Dom swallows down whatever sickness wanted to fight its way up at hearing 127, feeling the ache of sadness painfully crawl down her throat only to shoot back up again as tears. “W-why would you…” Her voice wavers, and she suddenly feels like she’s about to collapse on her knees (but, really, she can’t because she’s the one supporting _Nami_ who is actually about to probably pass out from exhaustion). In her shock, Dom couldn’t have fathomed Nami’s half-mumbled response with a tinge of humor in the words - and even while level-headed, she wouldn’t have been able to put the response very high on her list of expectations. “Because I love you, of course. What kind of question is that?” At first, she flashes back to years ago when she found out about Nami’s powers - how her friend told her that she wasn’t from 2015 and the words she had skipped over in a hurry to calm her beating heart. Love - Nami had said she loved her before, but it was a friend-only type of statement. So, her mind reacts instinctively, not able to wrap around going through so much self-deprecation for one friend, no matter how close. She doesn’t consider that maybe Nami’s actions only apply to those I-would-cross-oceans-for-you-because-I’m-in-love-with-you situations; she doesn’t give them a fleeting thought because she already knows that Nami won’t feel the same way. It’s not a mutual attraction. “Yeah, I know,” Dom replies easily, skimming over Nami’s words as she had in the past, eager to forget about the ache in her chest, “B-but, why go through the trouble? I… I don’t get it.” At this point, Nami tugs a little bit on her jacket, moving her out of the way of people walking down the sidewalk. They huddle together, near the entrance of the alleyway where Nami stumbled out of. A chuckle escapes Nami’s lips, “Because I love you.” She leans in closer, whispering in Dom’s ear with a breath that tickles, “More than friends.”

Dom thinks her mouth might have fallen open because Nami giggles, a chip of her former self breaking through. Time stops - figuratively, of course. She’s absolutely speechless, stunned into silence. Nami? Loves her? “I…” Still close to her ear, Nami whispers one last thing, “Happy Birthday, Dom. Sorry I, uh, didn’t bring you a present, though.” That manages to drag her thought processes back to normal. She can feel the heat creeping to her cheeks, though, and stutters, “I, um, n-no, it’s fine.” Dom takes a moment to gather herself, pulling Nami closer, no longer just focused on keeping her friend standing. They catch each other’s eyes, and Dom knows that Nami gets it with one glance - they don’t have to dramatically kiss in the middle of the street to make a point to each other. This - it’s mutual. She wraps her arms around Nami’s shoulders, afraid to let go in case her friend falls back into time’s grasp. “You’re my present this year.” she murmurs.


End file.
